This is the best way. Inline duct fan and a flex hose running out of your window (you can print an adapter/connector to fit perfectly). It works very well even if your enclosure is not airtight (and it shouldn't be when printing PLA since you want a constant stream of air getting inside for cooling) - just let negative pressure do its thing.
It may seem super silly or I'm just somehow dumb, but the "run a hose to your balcony" is the difficult part for me. That means having a door open for 10+ hours at a time, which is a climate control challenge for the room.
That's why I figured: Why not put the entire enclosure on the balcony, and then heat-humidity control the inside of it? Sure, more complex system and higher power draw, ... but maybe there's whole kits for this? Like, for keeping a 3D printer in a windy shed?
6" wide piece of cardboard that is floor to ceiling of the balcony door. Put it on the side where the door locks. Cut a hole near the bottom of it and stick the flexible tubing through it. Now you can shut the door and hold the cardboard in, while still maintaining the climate control.
You can use something thicker than cardboard like the plastic version of cardboard... google: 'Corrugated Plastic Polycarbonate Acrylic Sheets'.
I was also thinking that you can even extend a pole out your balcony and attach the tube to that. This way, the air makes it far enough out that it won't even blow back.
That does look not-so-bad, but ... unfortunately we also don't have a sliding door. Nor sliding windows. Germany goes for those mechanically complicated multi-direction tilt/swing hinges instead. They're super mental (and metal), and break my aspirations.
I know, I'm not an easy customer.
> Or just 3d print a new wife? (joking)
I've seen too many terrible Benchys in reviews to fall for this one!
> Why not put the entire enclosure on the balcony, and then heat-humidity control the inside of it?
How flammable is the insulation on your balcony? If you DIY it, then the danger of burning down your house might be bigger than the health risks of occasionally printing PLA in the living room.
Another option could be a used incubator, but an incubator big enough for a printer will probably cost more than the printer...
Kind of depends on ventilation setup in your house, some houses/condos are built to draw air through windows and out through fans with high static pressures, in which case trying to vent out don't work that well.
I tried it with SLA printer and it just filled the room with resin stinks for days. It really depends...
This is fantastic, thank you for your work! I'm excited to see this project combine a clean API in a popular language, with a fast online playground that requires no installation. Having played with OpenSCAD and CadQuery in the past, this feels like a big step forward.
Some suggestions (I'm sure you've already thought of most of these):
- It would be great to have notebook-like UI to isolate steps and allow faster partial rebuilds.
- live editing is great, but it'd be nice to automatically stop in-progress rebuild if another edit is made while it's computing. Right now it seems to always let a rebuild complete even if it's already out-of-date.
- Search on API/docs page would be really handy
- Face/vertex filtering API looks cleaner than CadQuery's, and I'm excited to try it out. In a lot of cases I would still really like to just be able to click on the model and get a reference in code. Even if it's just an index that would break if topology has changed. Auto-generating stable references/filters would be even better, when possible.
I love RP2040 (especially how circuit designer and firmware dev friendly it is) and even tried building my own MCU with it[1]
However I don't quite see the Bluetooth use case - RP2040 is not really a low power chip, making it pretty hard to use for a battery-powered IoT application. You'd need a pretty giant battery pack to make it last a long time.
Nordic's nrf52 is an order of magnitude better for a typical "sleep-burst transmit-sleep" cycle, and can be suspended to <5uA current. Pico W is $6, Seeed has a $10 nrf52 MCU, or you could get a "just hook up USB and power" bare module for $5-6.
nit: MCU is Micro Controller Unit, so for example rp2040 itself. What you mean is "board".
Completely right on the power consumption though. The NRF52 is also quite good at limiting power consumption while it's running and automatically disabling peripherals while not used (you typically do that with disabling clocks on other chips). It also has the sanest hardware registers I've seen (looks like they were actually designed with software in mind).
There's also a fully open source Bluetooth stack for the Nordic chips (Apache nimBLE) compared to the non-commercial use only but with some vague and possibly not yet available exception for the RP2040 license of the BTstack used here. (This seems to have been enabled by the radio hardware being fully documented, which is very unusual for Bluetooth chips.)
It's possible to use the RP2040 in a low power way if you're specifically code it to do so, no? It should be able to consume as little as 1.3mA in sleep state, so if you had an application with a loop that did something like read a sensor and send out a bluetooth or wifi signal, then sleep for 15 minutes, I think a few AAA batteries could power it for months, no? https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/124951/raspb...
I've got a bunch of ESP32's piggy-backing on USB chargers around the house doing BLE and wifi stuff. The things they're talking to are battery powered, but I want them plugged in to the mains. I could easily see myself using the Pico W in that job.
There are a lot of IOT applications that do rely on battery power. Regardless, this is nice for people whose MCU/embedded experience is limited to pre-existing firmwares and the Arduino ecosystem.
One use case would be a little desktop robot for an educational setting. The motors of a robot use orders of magnitude more power than the CPU so it needs big batteries anyway.
I can also imagine applications where the device has wall power but you want to connect to it with a phone. Like a piece of wall art you want to be able to turn on and off remotely.
RPi is too expensive to be an end-point IoT device too. But it is perfect to serve as a hub/base station. And this is where BT could be actually of use, for communication with cheaper end-point devices, for example.
Very cool, and excited to see more "Geometry as Code" tools getting built. In addition to comparing to OpenSCAD it'd also be awesome to see a comparison to CadQuery.
Cool idea, but it'd be great to add an explanation for choosing this over Stripe payment links (https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links). For Stripe, you can configure a redirect on success linking to your paid content so it should work for most use cases paidlink covers, no?
While the overall point of simple racks being better definitely stands, the premise that a bike needs two locks is just silly and impractical. Get wheel locks for your bikes - pinhead, hexlox (my favorite), etc. If your wheels are secured to the frame you just need to lock the frame with one lock/chain.
Takes way less time to park and you dont need to lug multiple 5lb locks (unfortunately thats how heavy secure locks actually are).
Pitlock are nice. The day I lost my Pinhead key and opened one with a flathead and a hammer in less than a minute was a little sobering. They’re still better than a quick release.
For sure, nothing is 100% secure (and even with multiple U-locks an angle grinder will win out after a while). I've had a good experience with hexlox so far - they are super hard to remove without a key. Haven't had any theft issues in multiple years of parking around San Francisco.
With wheel locks + 2 D locks you can get around the problem of the bike being used as a lever to break a single D lock. It also means thieves are less likely to screw with your bike trying to take the wheels off.
Well, I'd say that two locks are nice to have, if not entirely necessary. You can quickly use just the ring lock if you're hopping in and out of a store, and get out the larger one to lock your frame when you're storing your bike for a longer period.
Given that most old Android phones stop receiving security updates after only a couple years from purchase, you should probably not do anything that involves connecting them to your local network.
And if you don't have or can't afford a Pixel, you can check if your device is supported by my https://divestos.org project. Tested booting on 70+ devices with automated kernel CVE patching and monthly security updates.
